52 Ancestors - Week 7 - Valentine...Nebraska

As I was thinking about Valentine's Day this week, the story of my great grandparents, Isaac Rickell and Ida Ellen Andrews, came to mind. They were early residents of Box Butte County in western Nebraska, Isaac arriving when the area was still part of Dawes County.

Both Isaac and Ida had experienced much loss in their lives by the time they came to western Nebraska when they were both in their twenties. Isaac had lost both of his parents and all five of his brothers and sisters by the time he filed his Declaration of Intention to be come a citizen of the United States on the 6th of October in 1883, a month before his 24th birthday.

Isaac Rickell
Declaration of Intention
Original in Isaac's Personal Papers

Not quite two years later, Isaac appeared at the land office in Valentine, Cherry County, Nebraska, over 300 miles away, to claim a homestead in the future Box Butte County. Perhaps this business card is how he learned about free land. I wonder where he found it. Probably somewhere near his home in Platte County.

Original in Isaac's Personal Papers

The reverse side of the card gives a list of train fares from various places in Nebraska to Chadron. Is Chadron where he met Denis Daly?

Original in Isaac's Personal Papers

I'm not sure what the reverse side of the card means, exactly. Did the X's mark acreages that had already been claimed?

At any rate, Isaac chose the SW 1/4 of Section 14 in Township 27 of Range 50 West. Somehow he traveled over 100 miles from Valentine to Hemingford. Did the land agents go with their prospective homesteaders? Then travel the 100 miles back to the land office in Valentine?

Ida lost her mother when she was a child. After her grandfather, Elias Jones, passed, she came with her grandmother, Annis Cole Jones, in the spring of 1888 to the village of Hemingford in Box Butte County, where an uncle, B. F. Jones, had a general store. The family lived together in rooms over the store.

Isaac and Ida told their daughter, Bertha, about the day they met...when both went to the town well for water. I would love to know more details of their meeting that day at the well and the courtship that followed, but we do know that Isaac carried Ida's pail home for her. For her birthday, in September of 1889, Isaac gave Ida a beautiful red velvet photograph album. And, less than two months later, on Isaac's thirtieth birthday they were married.

Isaac Rickell and Ida E. Andrews
14 November 1889

The Rose is Red

the Violet blue

of all the earth

I love but you

When these lines

you here do see

will you agree

to marry me

If my name you now can guess

write your own

and Ans yes

Could this be how Isaac proposed to Ida? We will never know, but either way, it seems Isaac was quite the romantic soul!